Should we be concerned? You bet! According to the state Public Employment Relations Board, the settlement fostered on the village resulted in unaffordable salary increases while perpetuating costly work rules and benefits. In particular, their report noted the panels 2-1 rejection of the village’s proposals to increase the work year, to curtail severance pay, to reduce vacation and sick allotments and raise health insurance contributions for new hires. Their assessment closed that with “overtime and other extras, the village police force received an average annual salary of $141,384 before the arbitration award took place,” among the best paid in the state.

Village administrators are caught in a vortex of badly engineered law and political chicanery that goes well beyond the tolerable level. A clarion call to bring some form of reality into play continues to be ignored. The City of Detroit has been brought to its knees in its bankruptcy filing, Mayor Bloomberg exhibits unease and the taxpayers of the Village of Rockville Centre will have to live with increases in costs that might have been avoidable. In my next column, I’ll explain what Governor Cuomo intends to accomplish for cities he identifies as “virtually broke.” Stay tuned.